BUENOS AIRES, 1 January 2005 — A fire tore through a Buenos Aires nightclub packed with young New Year revelers and killed at least 175 people as a stampeding crowd was trapped by locked exit doors, officials said yesterday.

At least 714 people were injured in the Thursday night blaze, thought to have been caused by a flare that was fired during a rock concert and sent burning debris onto the crowd of up to 4,000 people, who desperately fought to flee.

“The fire spread in a minute and we were a mountain of people trying to escape,” said survivor Ariel Monges, 25, who lost a friend and a cousin in the smoke and flames and was searching for another friend at a city hospital. Four of the club’s six doors were tied shut with wire or padlocks, according to Interior Minister Anibal Fernandez.

“It appears they were condemned to walk into a trap,” Fernandez said. Mayor Anibal Ibarra said the emergency exits at the club, the Cromagnon Republic, appeared to be shut “so that people wouldn’t enter without paying.” Hospital lists showed most of the victims were in their teens and 20s, but rescue workers discovered children and babies in the club. Some fans had brought their children to a makeshift nursery in the women’s bathroom or held them on their laps during the concert, witnesses said.

“There was black smoke everywhere. People started pushing and we all fell down. You had to drag yourself along the floor but people fell on top of each other,” said Gaston, 22, a survivor who was looking for friends in the morgue.

Most of the victims died from smoke inhalation. Many of the dead had not yet been identified. Officials, who called the fire one of Argentina’s worst disasters, declared three days of mourning and ordered nightclubs in the capital closed on New Year’s Eve.

Pope John Paul II sent his condolences to the victims’ families in a letter to church authorities. Argentines awoke on New Year’s Eve to scenes of horror on television: Bodies lined up on the sidewalk, parents wailing and fainting and others frantically searching for loved ones.

Dazed survivors, blackened by soot, sat sobbing on the sidewalk outside the club or in hospitals.

“I want to go identify all the corpses there are, wherever they are. I need to know where my granddaughter is,” said a crying woman searching for 19-year-old Marianela Rojas.